Squigglebot: a battery powered spherical rolling robot as a model active matter system to measure its energetics

TL;DR

Squigglebot is a novel battery-powered spherical robot designed as an active matter model, enabling direct experimental measurement of energy consumption and dissipation, thus facilitating studies in non-equilibrium physics.

Contribution

It introduces a hardware platform that allows direct measurement of energy fluxes in active matter systems, addressing a key experimental challenge.

Findings

First direct measurement of energy influx in an active matter robot

Quantitative analysis of energy dissipation modes

Potential for studying non-equilibrium statistical physics

Abstract

Active matter systems use their internal or ambient source of energy and dissipate them at the scale of individual constituent particles to generate motion. Direct measurement of the energy influx for individual particles has not been achieved in the experiments. Here we present "Squigglebot" - a battery powered spherical rolling robot based on open source hardware as an artificial active matter system whose energy consumption as well as the energy dissipation into different modes of motion both can be measured experimentally. This can serve as a prototype system to study a number of interesting problems in non-equilibrium statistical physics, where details of the energetics are required.